I treasure this experience. Perhaps you know it too: sitting on the dock on a pleasant summer afternoon—the dimming sun, the gentle breeze, the water still, not yet zig-zagged and broken by weekend boaters. I am away from demands that would otherwise pull and tug at me. No traffic, no meetings. No constant stimulation either— no feeds or stories to vie for my attention; no dopamine hits from a buzzing hand-held device. Here, boredom finds me differently—somehow less painful and more inviting. I don’t necessarily push it away, nor do I reflexively react to it. I sit with it. It stays with me, and then it goes. It becomes transformed into something else. As someone who has spent more than 13 years studying boredom as an academic—that restless, unpleasant feeling of wanting but being unable to be engaged—I do not take my experience at the cottage for granted. It has changed not just my feelings about the concept, but my very understanding of it.
In an experiment conducted over the course of three weeks at the University of Essex, 155 students agreed to a minor inconvenience. Guided by a researcher, they took a short walk and ended up either at a lush, green park or facing a grey, concrete campus structure. At their new location, they were asked a few brief questions, some of which probed their emotional experiences. After that, they were thanked and dismissed. This was the experiment in its totality. It aimed simply to explore whether the two destinations had affected participants’ moods differently. Could a quick change in setting bring about a shift in one’s inner world?
Judging from the participants’ answers to a brief mood questionnaire, the result is clear: location matters. In fact, compared to those who stood facing concrete structures, students who visited the park experienced less boredom. The researchers dug deeper. In a follow-up study, they collected public tweets that signalled the experience of boredom and analyzed them using geographic and satellite data. The importance of location emerged again. Individuals’ likelihood to take to social media to vent about their boredom was shown to be related to their living environment. Those living in areas prominently characterized by natural geography—forests, bodies of water, or snowy landscapes—expressed less boredom in their tweets.
Such findings are at once surprising and commonplace. Surprising because they reveal the porousness of our emotional lives: even seemingly minor interventions—a simple change of view or a brief exposure to nature—can affect one’s feelings of boredom. Commonplace because many of us have long experienced what these studies seek to quantify. We feel relaxed or content, energized or alive, awestruck or happy when surrounded by nature, overlooking wilderness, standing under a starry night, or listening to the endless rise and crash of waves. It is not just us—as individuals—who have internalized this lesson. The psychological power of green and blue spaces is entrenched in long-standing cultural beliefs and consumerist attitudes: from forest bathing to beach walks, from hiking in our nearest park to faraway ecotourism, we seek exposure to nature so that we can either elevate or repair ourselves. An ever-growing body of empirical work shows that exposure to natural environments reduces stress, enhances attention and memory, elevates moods, and reduces negative affect.
I doubt that I need to convince you of nature’s many beneficial effects. Perhaps you are even reading this from a forested retreat or a cabin that is beside a lake. What does, however, deserve our attention is the temptation to citify such spaces—to transport the habits of urban life into them and in doing so, to spoil what nature so generously offers. The citification of cottage or country life not only delivers amenities, gadgets, high-speed internet, and social media feeds, but it also threatens to transform our relationship to boredom.
Boredom has received an astonishing amount of attention, not only recently but throughout our intellectual history. It figures in ancient texts, religious manuals, metaphysical explorations, moral treatises, psychological studies, novels, poems, films, songs—you name it. I mention our continuous fascination with it only to bring up a question that may be in the reader’s mind: why should we care whether and how we experience boredom?
The answer to this question lies in boredom’s very nature. Most fundamentally, boredom is a felt realization that we are cognitively “out of sync” with our environment or ourselves. We experience boredom when we desire, but do not have, satisfactory cognitive engagement: that is, the right sort of stimulation escapes us. Boredom is the bothersome under- or mis-utilization of our cognitive capacities—a mental itch that we must, but cannot easily, scratch. Precisely because it calls on us to act—in effect, it urges us to make it go away—boredom leads to a remarkably diverse set of outcomes. Its offspring are many. Picking up a book or a new hobby, going for a walk or talking to a friend, starting a new career or weeding the garden, these are all appropriate answers to boredom’s call. But so are their darker relatives: destruction of property, speeding when driving, drinking too much, gambling, committing sadistic acts, or embracing extreme ideologies.
We often mistake boredom with downtime. Boredom is not a relaxed, unoccupied state of mind. It is a cognitive ache, a state that we do not desire to be in—not a great form of suffering, but a pain nonetheless. Downtime is none of those things. We don’t seek escape from it; we wish, if we could, to bask in it. The pain of boredom, however, is its point: it impresses upon us that we are not satisfied with our situation and compels us to take action—for better or worse.
The importance of boredom, I hope, is becoming clearer. With it, the danger of citifying cottage life begins to emerge. It is crucial to realize that how we react to boredom—how we seek to respond to its call for greener cognitive pastures—depends on the resources that we have at our disposal. When we are in the city, in step with the frequency of its hectic rhythms, we avail ourselves of the structures and technologies that make up our urban lifestyle. Smartphones, social media feeds, and streaming services are always close to us, tempting us to use them so that we rid ourselves of boredom’s pain. Quick and mindless engagement with technology often does the trick—it scratches, temporarily at least, the itch of boredom. What such activities fail to do, however, is to engage the cause of the itch. The immediate availability of our devices and digital distractions offers us no time to pause and ask why boredom arises. Is it due to some trivial situational cause, for example, waiting at the doctor’s office? Or could it be the product of an underlying condition worth interrogating—the symptom of a dead-end career, a fraying romantic relationship, or an eclipsing sense of purpose? Through our technological tools, we have become adept at staving off boredom. But we have also given up the chance for critical self-reflection and have become reliant on them for their alleviating power. Indeed, there is very little in those ready-made remedies that is self-enriching. Social media platforms are decidedly not in the business of refining our intellectual capacities, broadening our imaginative horizons, or sharpening our moral and empathetic skills. Most of the time, they can’t even deliver plain old contentment.
Back at the dock, the sun still setting, the breeze flowing, the lake smooth, a different rapport with boredom is available to us. As the busyness and ubiquitous noise of urban life begin to recede, so do many of our automatic, technologically mediated responses to boredom. In their absence, we are called to deal with boredom intentionally and thoughtfully. Boredom doesn’t magically disappear, even if, just like the subjects of the opening experiment, we are likely to experience it less often and less intensely. It still comes—perhaps gentler, but no less instructive. Sure, it brings with it its usual questions (“What is it that bothers me?” “What can I do to find satisfaction?”). But in nature, it also brings the possibility of answers.
At the cottage, the task of responding to boredom becomes unmistakably ours. Away from the pings and red bubbles of digital life, our attention remains our own, and we are thus able to meet boredom on our own terms. Our response to boredom comes from within. Because it is we who must generate the engagement we seek, the result promises to be not only more personalized but also more edifying. Through our dealings with boredom, we may come to recognize what brings us meaning, satisfaction, and cognitive joy. Our authenticity and psychic vitality are maintained, not given away as collateral for a stream of stimulation that is only stimulating as long as it is streaming.
What the cottage gives us isn’t merely an exposure to green and blue spaces, fresh air, or magnificent vistas. Its benefits go beyond even its salutary contributions to our physical and psychological well-being. Nature can also give us back a piece of our own forgotten self.
Andreas Elpidorou is a philosophy professor at the University of Louisville and an expert on boredom. He spends his summers at a cottage in Muskoka.
This story originally appeared in our Summer ’26 issue.
Related Story Why is it that men traditionally man the barbecue?
Related Story How to conquer cottage traffic (without losing your mind)
Related Story This multi-generational family of 30 gathers for a raucous annual reunion at an old Muskoka inn